This Chicago custom home wowed the judges with its strong sense of place and its sensitive relationship to the urban streetscape. “It really seems like Chicago to me,” said one. Architect Mark Peters, AIA, recessed much of the three-story house's top level to help it blend in with the surrounding buildings. “It was important to us to maintain the scale and proportion of the neighborhood,” he says.

Peters clustered private spaces in the project's masonry portion, while public rooms occupy an adjoining cedar-and-glass cube. “We tried to create the transparent cube so the house would be more inviting to the street,” he explains. “You're able to see through the building to the back and see how the materials wrap around it.” The white ground-face masonry blocks cladding the private wing, for example, also cover the double-height living room wall. And the cedar cladding continues inside on the second-floor ceilings, then outside again to form a backyard canopy.